I’m very excited to share the finished invitations for my wedding! I’ve been working on these for a few months and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome. When I started designing these, I wanted something simple, modern, minimal and fun while also reflecting the theme of the wedding (Las Vegas). I didn’t want anything too pretty and even though I love the look of clean lines and a modern black and white colour scheme I wanted it to be a little more fun and less polished because that is the whole vibe of our wedding. Without further adieu, let me introduce my modern DIY Las Vegas wedding invitations
I began the process by designing the main 5″ x 7″ card in black and white. I wanted to screen print the invitations my self, which meant I could only use 1 colour because I only have a 1 colour screen press. I hand lettered our names and bought a las vegas vector graphic from Creative Market. I kept it simple with the date, location and Las Vegas skyline. I wanted most of the details to live on our website.
Unfortunately after a few attempts at printing it myself, it was clear my screen wouldn’t work for this job because the mesh count wasn’t high enough. I decided to avoid the stress and get it professionally screen printed at Kid Icarus. They turned out great except the white isn’t as white as I expected, it’s a little on the grey side but oh well!
The next item I worked on was the map. I wanted the ceremony and reception location to be a part of the invitation but in a more creative and useful way. I figured this is something the guest could take with them to Vegas and it would have all the info they need for the wedding.
I grabbed a screen shot of the Las Vegas strip from google maps, imported it into Illustrator and started drawing vector shapes on top. I also grabbed a few stock images from freepik.com for things like the trees, buildings and road icons. Originally I had the map in grey with only a few of the icons in pink but decided to make it a monochromatic pink colour scheme because of the iconic pink cadillac. I chose the pink cadillac because we will be married by Elvis and will be taking a little ride in his pink cadillac after the ceremony.
I plotted out the important locations like the ceremony, hotel and dinner. I used the bottom area as a legend for the itinerary, keeping it short and sweet.
Once I had the map done I thought about how I wanted to present it within the invitation. I thought it might be a cute idea to fold it face in and then put a sticker on the blank side.
The next question was, what should I put on the sticker? I had a few ideas but I thought an illustration of us would add more personalization. I found an awesome illustrator on Fiverr to do a Tim Burton style portrait based on a photo of us in our engagement party attire. I cut out our figures from the original image using Photoshop and placed them under a garland vector I found on freepik. I got the stickers printed at stickeryou.com using their online uploader.
To hold it all together I cut out rectangular pieces of card stock and wrapped them around the card and map. The only thing I was missing from my invitations was the RSVP (which I didn’t want on the map) so I made a rubber stamp with the rsvp info and website address.
The challenge with stamping white ink on black paper is the white doesn’t turn out totally opaque and sharp. To fix this I embossed the image after stamping it. This was my first time embossing, I bought a heat gun from Michaels as well as fine white embossing powder. Embossing is pretty simple, you stamp using slow drying ink on the card, pour embossing powder over the image, flick the paper so the powder outside of the image falls off and then use the heat gun to melt the powder. The image turned out totally white and also had a nice raised feel to it. I’m a little obsessed with embossing now. I used the same technique for the return address on the back.
The last step was to hand letter every single envelope (27). This took a while but I think they ended up looking really awesome. I also added a final touch with Star Trek postage stamps to represent my fiancee.
So, how much did this all cost? Here’s the breakdown:
Map Prints (35 prints @ 8.5 x 14) : $35.00
Card Prints (40 prints @ 5 x 7 cardstock) : $87.00
Stickers (50 stickers @ 4 x 5) : $76.00
Cardstock for bands : $4.00
2 Rubber Stamps (address & rsvp) : $50.00
Ink Pad : $8.00
Embossing Powder : $6.00
Heat Gun : $35.00
Postage : $50.00
Vegas Vector: $10.00
Total: $360 CDN
